ABSTRACT
Each forest type goes through a period of infancy, youth, maturity, old age and rebirth. In some forests such as the northern boreal regions, this process of succession is dependent on fire that reduces them to ashes, after which rebirth starts again immediately. In the deciduous regions the process is continuous under natural conditions. Parts of the community die and regenerate, but the forest as a whole remains. Odum describes this constantly evolving pattern of forest growth, starting with a field from which the forest has been cleared and abandoned.1 The original forest that occupied the field will return, but only after a series of temporary plant communities have prepared the way. The successive stages of the new forest will each be different from that which ultimately develops. While subject to much discussion by ecologists today, Odum describes succession as being based on three parameters:
it is the ‘orderly’ process of community changes which are ‘predictable’; it results from the modification of the physical environment by the community; it culminates in the establishment of as ‘stable’ an ecosystem as is biologically
possible on the site in question.
